MUST-READ OF THE WEEK: TEMPORARILY INSANE BY CARL BORGEN
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Proving that truth sometimes is much stranger than fiction, Temporarily Insane by Carl Borgen tells the enthrallingly eccentric and inspiring story of a group of aging hippies who have dedicated their lives to proving that an ancient civilisation lies buried underneath the North Pole.
By Timothy Arden
It has been said that travel broadens the mind, but that is a gross understatement in the case of Dutch-Canadian author Carl Borgen.
For it was while venturing along the hippie trail in Asia in the early 1980s that he first heard of a story so fascinating and profound that it changed his entire outlook on the purpose of life and the origins of civilisation.
It was called ‘The Bock Saga’ and, it is claimed, is an oral history of the first people on Earth that had been secretly passed down within the Bock family from generation to generation for more than a thousand years—though its origins stretch back far, far further.
Borgen and his friends heard the saga on the sun-drenched beaches of Goa and that setting, as well as the care-free lifestyle they were living, so vividly described in the book, must have seemed not a million miles away from the world in which this story—an alternative creation myth and history lesson rolled into one—narrated.
The epic tale had come from the lips of one of their acquaintances, Ior Bock, a Finnish mystic who said that he was the last in the Bock line and that, as such, he was revealing the closely-guarded saga to ensure that it would endure after his death.
In short, the saga describes a global civilisation, the ‘Aser’, whose empire was centred in ‘Odenma’, which is where the Finnish capital Helsinki is now but which was, then, at the Earth’s North Pole.
The Aser, so the saga says, were highly advanced yet at the same time living in harmony with nature, in a period known as ‘Paradise Times’. Though they eventually succumbed to an ice age—‘Alt-land-is’ (from which, apparently, ‘Atlantis’ is derived)—they were the parents of all humans today and gifted all the civilisations to come with language, writing, and many other arts.
This, though, was more than just a colourful legend. It spoke of a temple, ‘Lemminkäinen’, that would lead to a treasure chamber of inconceivable size and which still held the priceless treasures of this forgotten people. Moreover, it indicated exactly where this temple could be found today.
For Borgen and his friends, who had first gone travelling to escape the decayed urban lifestyles of their parents, this was revelatory. Here was a testimony from the ages that not only endorsed but crowned a hippie-like existence as the true heritage and model for all mankind.
Borgen’s friends vowed to do whatever it took to uncover the temple, locate the treasure chamber, and show the world the truth, while Borgen—equally affected yet not willing to sacrifice his life for what could, possibly, be a fool’s errand, chose to say behind.
Temporarily Insane is the real-life story of that group’s subsequent mission to prove the material existence of the Bock Saga, and it’s the most bonkers yet brilliant book you’ll read this year.
Combining a tale of true adventure, with New Age prophecy and memoir, there really isn’t anything quite like this title. The same could be said of the Saga itself, of course, which is weaved in throughout the text to provide additional context and insight into the myth that continues to drive devotees—Bockists—to act like Indian Jones, though with a horned fur hat preferable to fedora.
So, since 1987, a small but dedicated team of amateur archaeologists have been excavating the Temple of Lemminkäinen on the Bock family estate.
According to Ior Bock, the temple was sealed in 987AD to protect the pagan artefacts from Catholic crusaders who invaded Finland, so the first job was to open it back up.
As Carl, now in his sixties, reflects in Temporarily Insane: “Our protagonists didn’t have to find this treasure; they knew where it was. All they had to do was dig it up and show the world, help everyone understand and believe what life was like in the beginning. Simple, right?”
Yet the task has continued on for more than 30 years, and is detailed in all its bizarre yet utterly addictive twists and turns.
There are run-ins with the police over drug-smuggling offences, committed to buy dynamite to blast clear the temple entrance (!), hostile reactions from the Finnish government and mainstream academics, and the brutal murder of Ior Bock in 2010.
Indeed, the title of the book comes from description ascribed to Bock’s killer, a carer who came to believe the aging hippie-cum-guru was an agent of the Devil.
As a reader, what I found most interesting were the characters who propel the story onwards. There’s Ior, who was clearly a charismatic influencer, and the followers who have given their everything to show the Man that the world should be paradise.
The Scandinavian media portrayed Bock and his friends in the most negative of lights, as Borgen reveals: “They described Ior as a satanic cult leader who brainwashed his followers with his dangerous Saga. The campaign was … [that] the Bock Saga is evil, and everything and everybody that has anything to do with it is also evil.”
